A. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to document search engines and, more particularly, to highlighting select documents returned from a search engine.
B. Description of Related Art
The World Wide Web (“web”) contains a vast amount of information. Locating a desired portion of the information, however, can be challenging. This problem is compounded because the amount of information on the web and the number of new users inexperienced at web searching are growing rapidly.
Search engines attempt to return hyperlinks to web pages in which a user is interested. Generally, search engines base their determination of the user's interest on search terms (called a search query) entered by the user. The goal of the search engine is to provide links to high quality, relevant results to the user based on the search query. Typically, the search engine accomplishes this by matching the terms in the search query to a corpus of pre-stored web pages. Web pages that contain the user's search terms are “hits” and are returned to the user.
In an attempt to increase the relevancy and quality of the web pages returned to the user, a search engine may attempt to sort the list of hits so that the most relevant and/or highest quality pages are at the top of the list of hits returned to the user. For example, the search engine may assign a rank or score to each hit, where the score is designed to correspond to the relevance or importance of the web page. Existing techniques of determining relevance are based on the contents of the web page. More advanced techniques determine the importance of a web page based on more than the content of the web page. For example, one known method, described in the article entitled “The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Search Engine,” by Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page, assigns a degree of importance to a web page based on the link structure of the web page. In other words, the Brin and Page algorithm attempts to quantify the importance of a web page based on more than just the content of the web page.
The goal of a search engine is to return the most desirable set of links for any particular search query. However, in addition to just returning the most desirable set of links, it may also be beneficial to present the set of links to the user in a manner that clearly and quickly informs the user of the content associated with each of the links.
One method of apprising the user of the content associated with a particular link is to also display a “snippet” of text with the link. Ideally, the snippet of text should summarize the content of the link. In practice, the snippets are typically drawn from text of the document referenced by the link. Although text snippets can be useful in summarizing the link, the quality of the snippet in accurately summarizing the link can vary based on factors such as the automated nature of snippet generation and the quality of the underlying document. Also, for snippets to be useful, the user must take time to read the snippet.
There is a need in the art for improved techniques for apprising the user of the contents of links returned in response to a search query.